R.E.M.’s Out of Time turns 30 years old today.
I knew there was music before this album. But I didn’t know there was music like this before this album. It hit my ears at exactly the right time and locked in R.E.M. as my first “favorite band” (because these things are obviously very important as we’re grow up). I was still pretty new in Bryan County High School in Pembroke, GA when it came out. I didn’t know many people there yet, and most of the people I had met weren’t listening to R.E.M. If you want a taste of what pop/radio/top-40 music was like in 1991, take a look here. This album is the first one that felt like “mine.”
I bought Out of Time at a record store in Oglethorpe Mall in Savannah, and I remember listening to it a lot on bus rides to out-of-town baseball games that year. Cassette in my Walkman and rickety headphones on my ears, I leaned my forehead against the window and stared out at the rural fields and barns and farm houses and crooked electric poles as they passed by in a blur. In my ears, Michael Stipe was singing over a mandolin strum about losing his religion, and I was sure the song was about love but I didn’t know who or what it was really about but it still made complete sense at the time. I was still pretty young, so it wouldn’t have occurred to me that people could actually lose their religion. But whether it was literal or metaphorical, I felt Stipe’s plaintive loss, and it became my own in my relatively new small-town Georgia world.
Out of Time is a flex album – one where R.E.M. went into the studio with a crazy-wide range of musical ideas, tones, textures, and structures, and they decided to use them all. New instruments, too. Mandolin, saxophones, string arrangements, plucked violins, a freaking flugelhorn…it was all on the table. It’s lush and rich in ways the band hadn’t fully indulged before. Going back and listening to “Endgame” is a different experience as an adult, when a lot of other bands have found ways to weave this level of intricate instrumentalization into their songs. But it was new in 1991, and it was a risk. R.E.M. took it, and it holds up beautifully now.
This is also the album that includes R.E.M.’s best song. Michael Stipe has been saying for decades that his favorite song is “Country Feedback,” and there’s a reason for that: It’s gorgeous and heartbreaking and emotionally bare and perfect. R.E.M. is a band that defies definition, but it’s safe to say that they’re best known for their jangling, frenetic pop songs. If they have a “sound” most people know, it’s some amalgamation of “Superman,” “(Don’t Go Back To) Rockville,” “It’s the End of the World as We Know It,” “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?,” “Stand,” and “Man on the Moon.”
“Country Feedback” turns that sound on its head. It’s a pedal-steel-driven slow burn of stream-of-consciousness longing, loss, and a desperate will to hold onto something as it's slipping away. I don’t know of any other song like it – by R.E.M. or by anyone else. It comes near the end of this album, and it might be the most universally true thing Michael Stipe has ever written and Peter Buck has ever played. It’s preceded by two other excellent songs (“Half a World Away” and “Texarkana”) that set it up for maximum impact. The soaring strings, harmonic vocals, (Mike Mills’) driving bass, and (Peter Buck’s) unmistakable guitar jangle of “Texarkana” mean that “Country Feedback” catches us off-guard – makes us slow down and really listen and feel it. And that’s exactly how it should be.
Not every song on Out of Time is perfect. “Radio Song” sounds anachronistic in a post-radio age, and KRS-1’s rap verse in it feels pretty dated. It’s a risky song that sounds very much in its time, and it hasn’t aged particularly well. One of my least favorite songs in R.E.M.’s catalogue, the saccharine-sweet and over-bubbly “Shiny Happy People,” drops right in the exact middle of the album. It’s an automatic skip for me when I listen to the Out of Time now, but I guess the infectious chorus and guest vocals by the B-52s’ Kate Pierson at least provided a radio hit that might have exposed some new listeners to the band. As an album closer, “Me in Honey” lacks the gravity or resonance of “Find the River” from Automatic for the People and “Electrolite” from New Adventures in Hi-Fi.
But on the whole, Out of Time still holds together well as an extraordinary collection of songs. I don’t know if that’s because my high-school-sophomore self so internalized this album after dozens of listens that I can’t imagine or hear it as anything other than a wildly new, original album that still makes an extraordinary sonic and emotional impact. But that’s what it still sounds like when I listen to it now. I also think it’s important because it kicked off what still stands as the best four-album run of any band during the ’90s. From Out of Time to Automatic for the People to Monster to New Adventures in Hi-Fi, no other band maintained the level of lyrical and musical quality that R.E.M. did in that decade. They outlasted Nirvana, they embraced and perfected pop rock as Pearl Jam was rejecting it, and they created the template for creative experimentation that Radiohead would perfect as the decade drew to a close and we headed into a new century/millennium.
Out of Time was the start of something pretty special for R.E.M., and it was good to have a reason to listen to it again today. It brought back a flood of memories from another time and place, and it triggered parts of my brain that probably hadn’t been touched in a while. "Out of Time" is a curious choice for a title, because the phrase can mean either "outside of time" or "time's up." For me, this album has always fallen on the side of the former. I can still see the fields and farms flying by outside the bus window. I can still hear Michael Stipe helping me find footing in an unfamiliar place. In some ways, that's never changed.